Still reading "The damned of Petersburg". Up to when they start the crater attack.

God that was such a fucking disaster, the crater thing. The book is a novel but like I said it's very well researched and it goes into why that fucked up so badly.

(The initial plan was to send the US Colored Troops in as the spearhead of the assault, basically the union digs under the confederate lines and detonates an explosive and breaches their way in. They had been specifically trained for this operation, mind you. Then the commanders just reversed it and had them come in last, fearing that if it went wrong it'd look bad politically. So it's one of those great "what if" deals of history, if they had gone with the initial plan and not worried about political or optics repercussions in the newspapers up north, who knows if it would have worked instead of failing.)

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JE SUIS CHARLIE

These are not fairy tales, or myths. This place of power is tangible, and as such, can be found, entered, and perhaps, utilized in some fashion..

Cain at Gettysburg might go on pause soon, my mom found this book in the library called "Camp Sharpe's 'psycho boys': From Gettysburg to Germany" and I'm gonna have to grab that away or something because it sounds really interesting.

Camp Sharpe was this...I'd heard of it kind of in passing...like, I guess secret installation in one of the woods around here and the 'psycho boys' part I guess refers to the fact the camp was used to train military intelligence and propaganda services during ww2.

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JE SUIS CHARLIE

These are not fairy tales, or myths. This place of power is tangible, and as such, can be found, entered, and perhaps, utilized in some fashion..

Mostly focused around the health aspects of education, and that the increased health also leads to benefiting the rest of the outcomes (for the household and SES).

But man oh man, I can't focus lately.

Does it mention about the religious/cultural reasons for this. (Spoiler alert: Islam and hardocre wrong version Christianity is getting into that broad region. Also it probably wasn't super duper woman friendly in terms of reproductive rights anyway). Or does it just go "THE WEST MUST DO STUFF TO HELP ;_;" so as not to piss people off.

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JE SUIS CHARLIE

These are not fairy tales, or myths. This place of power is tangible, and as such, can be found, entered, and perhaps, utilized in some fashion..

Reading "Cain at Gettysburg".....this author has a lower opinion of general sickles than I do yeah.

(Then again a lot of people do, I don't like how they depict him as just a total politician sociopath. He kinda was but it wasn't pure sociopath malevolence, dude was cray cray sometimes but....ah, then again I have a cat named sickles so my bias is clear.)

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JE SUIS CHARLIE

These are not fairy tales, or myths. This place of power is tangible, and as such, can be found, entered, and perhaps, utilized in some fashion..

I think maybe that's intentional though, because the novel "the killer angels" and the movie "Gettysburg" was pretty heavy on the 20th maine and little round top and Chamberlain and the author was probably like "I don't wanna retread that".

(The film based off killer angels especially was. I forget if I've made this joke but I've heard people good-naturedly joke about an alternative title being "Bobby Lee and Lawrences excellent adventure" cause pretty much the movie is only Lee and Chamberlain.)

Again though I don't fully agree with his interpretation of Sickles. Then again the author is ex-military so maybe he doesn't have as much patience for the political generals (which he totally was, nobody's gonna dispute that.)

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JE SUIS CHARLIE

These are not fairy tales, or myths. This place of power is tangible, and as such, can be found, entered, and perhaps, utilized in some fashion..

Still finishing "Cain at Gettysburg" cause nothing was goin' down today. Close to the end of it.

Yeah I'll just say it. This is better than "The Killer Angels" (that's the novel the movie "Gettysburg" was based on, and...it's fine but I think I'm sick of it being the gold standard of novels about the battle. This is better. Yes, of course the author has a lower opinion of Dan Sickles than I do but...so does pretty much everybody, I'm sort of the designated Sickles fanboy. My 21st birthday was debating in favor of his actions with a random person in a bar.)

I guess after this I'll try to finish off all the ones he's written. Because I think the last one, "Judgment at Appomatox" is out. His research is sort of amazing, at the end of "Damned of Petersberg" he mentions tracking down a book about even the weather during the stuff written about, meaning if the novel says it rained or something...yes that was looked up. It's legit impressive.

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JE SUIS CHARLIE

These are not fairy tales, or myths. This place of power is tangible, and as such, can be found, entered, and perhaps, utilized in some fashion..

I'm not that far into it (think I'm like...maybe 30 or so pages in but I became busy and stopped), so I'm still at the stuff about Meriweather Lewis which is very early on. But already the rings connected to the lodges are mentioned.

Whether or not this will really tie into the show remains to be seen, Mark Frost wrote it and I dunno if Lynch really was involved.

It's....interesting. Written as like a series of 'documents' going back to the corps of discovery. So kinda like an alternate history novel a bit.

Spoiler (click to show/hide):

It seems to posit for narrative purposes that Lewis' death, which has been conjectured about, may have somehow had to do with something he found out about a conspiracy....the bavarian illuminati kinda butting heads with freemasonry gets involved but in a fictionalized way

So that's clearly Frost just having some fun.

If you like twin peaks and/or alternate history novels then yeah I'd probably say give it a go. The format might be a little off putting because, again, not a straight narrative.

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JE SUIS CHARLIE

These are not fairy tales, or myths. This place of power is tangible, and as such, can be found, entered, and perhaps, utilized in some fashion..

I was debating whether or not to put this in the twin peaks thread, or this one, cause it could go in either...but I just like this bit from the opening.

Quote:

A wise man once told me that mystery is the most essential ingredient of life, for the following reason: mystery creates wonder, which leads to curiosity, which in turn provides the ground for our desire to understand who and what we truly are.

The search for meaning at the heart of life brings us to the contemplation of an eternal enigma. Mysteries are the stories we tell ourselves to contend with life’s resistance to our longing for answers. Mysteries abound. This continent, this country, our own earthly origins are all laden with them, underlying our existence, pre-dating all our childish notions of “history.” Mythology precedes our access to historical or scientific fact, and, we know now, fulfilled much the same function for earlier civilizations – providing meaning in the face of a remorseless, indifferent universe – but in the absence of scientifically verifiable fact it is necessary to sometimes view them as one and the same.

So it is best to start at the beginning.

So signed and duly sworn:

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JE SUIS CHARLIE

These are not fairy tales, or myths. This place of power is tangible, and as such, can be found, entered, and perhaps, utilized in some fashion..

Judgment at Appomattox. I think I've mentioned Ralph Peters' novels about the civil war before, this is maybe the final one. I still haven't read..I think there's two, "Valley of the shadow" and "Hell or Richmond"...also he seems to have been signaling that he'll do another one (yes plz)

I only started it. My mom picked it up the other day and read it first. Apparently it's just as good as you'd expect. If it's anything like "The damned of Petersburg" or "Cain at Gettysburg" it's gonna be fantastic.

I'm raving about these because they are just that good. The amount of research this guy does seems staggering, I think it was damned of Petersburg where he actually tracked down like what the weather conditions would have been like at the time of the stuff in the novel.

Don't go into these expecting a kinda sanitized, glorified narrative of things. The other reason these are great is it goes into unsparing, sometimes graphic detail about the like..psychology and even the day to day conditions including their illnesses or whatever, of the characters..and it's not just the generals, it focuses a lot on the average soldiers (cain at gettysburg gets fucking dark with some of that).

Like, yeah these are novels but they're very thoroughly researched and the fictional parts are grounded in actual accounts and all. And you can tell this guy was in the military because the psychological dynamics of it seem very searing and real.

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JE SUIS CHARLIE

These are not fairy tales, or myths. This place of power is tangible, and as such, can be found, entered, and perhaps, utilized in some fashion..

I'm not super far into it. But already this is kinda reminding me a little of twin peaks. Or specifically I'm thinking of the scene where Earle (which, if I recall, was more Frost's idea than Lynch) talking about the "dugpas" or whatever and the black lodge. Or at some point in this novel a character describes a bunch of occultist people trying to access some dark plane of existence.

I think Frost wrote this slightly after season 2 ended so maybe that sort of concept was still in his mind. If I had to speculate.

Having read "secret history of twin peaks" the whole like crazy occultism and alternate history, for lack of a better way of describing it, stuff seems to be sort of his jam.

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JE SUIS CHARLIE

These are not fairy tales, or myths. This place of power is tangible, and as such, can be found, entered, and perhaps, utilized in some fashion..